Phonology In Children

Phonology is a fundamental principle for language in every individual’s life. We are exposed to this principle before and after birth and throughout our lives. Phonology is fundamental to all spoken languages, each language having its own system. Regardless of the types of language spoken to a child, children have difficulties producing meaningful speech because they haven’t grown into their oral structure, in other words, their teeth. Children are developing the ability to produce speech sounds through their ongoing process of practicing and learning how sounds are produced (Hoff, 2013, p.116). Phonological processes enables them to obtain more words, and each child develops “systematic ways in which to alter the sounds of the target language
Factors such as birth order, socioeconomic status, personality traits, and the level of education of the parents all have an impact in what words the child will learn and eventually utilize. Jacob is fortunate to have educated parents with a higher socioeconomic status, which allows Jacob to build his own vocabularies at a faster rate… and educated mothers talk to their children more (Hoff, 2013, p.152). Out of 115 nouns, verbs, and adjectives, 54% of these were unique words. 37 nouns and 63 verbs were recorded. Nouns are mainly more common in children’s speech compared with verbs because in learning nouns children only need to learn the labels for meanings they already have. Children have an understanding of things based on their awareness of the physical world, as oppose in learning verbs children have to figure out how meaning is assembled by their language. These rational meanings are less available to children through nonlinguistic experiences (p.142). Although verbs aren’t as easy to understand as nouns, Jacob demonstrated to have a good concept of the use of verbs. For instance the verb “look” was used with a clear understanding of its role: “It looks so cute” (Utt.87) and “Look! It esercising” (Utt.96). The sentences aren’t complex but he understands the use of the verb. Jacob is using words and is learning about their meaning as well as leaning how they are used in relation
Jacob’s MLU is 2.9, putting him in stage III. Jacob had a lot of short sentences of one morpheme each, which can be found such as in 1, 2, 3, 6, 13, 14, 20, 23, 30, 33, 36, 37, 39, 41, 44, , 46, 49, 51, 54, 56, 67, 79, 97, and in 98 when he said “why”. His longest sentence, “Make it into a ball again ate Jaynia” (Utt. 96) a total of 8 morphemes, where all the words counted as one morphemes. Contrary to, “she’s doing cupcakes” (Utt. 42) is quite a short sentence of only three words but there is a total of six morphemes. This demonstrates that it doesn’t matter how many words a child uses or is able to use, but what is important is their ability to apply morphology in their language. Children of the ages between 31months through 34 months who are in the third stage of Brown’s MLU are children begin to add morphemes to their word combinations. Jacob, at 3 years old at the time of the recording, fits right into the age range for the stage, although through the utterances that were recorded he seem to be quite advanced. Jacob knows how to properly use the morphemes when he communicates, for example, when he said, “That means I played on the wemoe totol” (Utt.8). (Brenda